I think every child should experience a disk failure. After all, it's only a matter of time before each of us has one. Better to get it out of the way when we h

I think every child should experience a disk failure. After all, it's only a matter of time before each of us has one. Better to get it out of the way when we have little to lose. People replying will recommend many backup solutions. No matter what you go with, it's important to trust no single party. Your home could burn down. Dropbox/Crashplan/S3/etc could fail. Media in a safe-deposit box could become corrupted over time. (This is common with flash-based storage and CDs.) Pick at least two independent backup solutions. Also, backups are a lifestyle change. They're something you have to maintain indefinitely. File systems, I/O interfaces, media formats, APIs, and businesses all come and go over time. There's no one thing that is sure to keep your data around for decades. Finally, most people don't have much data that's actually important. I have maybe 20GB of stuff that matters to me: photos I've taken, documents I've written, and a few videos. In terms of value per byte, documents are the highest, followed by photos, then video. It's much easier to maintain backups when your data set is small. Music, books, and other mass media can be re-bought/downloaded.